Negative Keywords Scrubbing
What is negative keyword scrubbing?
It is an activity which involves adding irrelevant terms as negative in the account by scrubbing the search term report.
Why do we perform negative keyword scrubbing?
We perform the activity of keywords scrubbing and add them as negatives in order to avoid irrelevant traffic to our website. It will help us to focus on only the keywords that matter to our customer. Better targeting can put your ad in front of interested users and increase your return on investment (ROI).
When is adding negative keyword a useful optimization technique:
Adding negative keywords in your account is useful when client is concerned with increasing CPC/CPA and wants to operate at a lower CPC/CPA without impacting conversions.
How do we scrub the search term report for negative keywords?
Step 1: Consider Last 30 Days as the date range (in case you want it for a longer period you can set accordingly). Go to Modify Columns and under Match type select Broad Match type. After that you go to “Added/Excluded” column and select only “None”.
Step 2: Download the report in excel. Make sure you have columns for conversion, CPA and Cost. (You can select Clicks and CPC also, according to your Key Performance Indicator{KPI})
Step 3: Name the first tab of excel file you downloaded as “Raw”. Copy-paste all the cells in another tab of the same sheet and rename it as “Work”.
Step 4:Apply text filter on the column “search terms” and look for adult terms like “xxx”, “porn”, “sex”, etc. In case your campaigns are serving to a particular location then you can also try searching for other locations in the search terms. In case you find any irrelevant search terms highlight them in any colour of your choice. After highlighting remove the filters.
Step 5: Apply Filters according to the data you have received. If the data is less you may have to apply just one filter or if the data is too much then you might need to incorporate more and more relevant filters. You can start with the following filters.
- Conversions = 0
- Conversions = 0, Cost > 2* Account’s Avg. CPA
- Conversions = 0, Cost > 3* Account’s Avg. CPA
- Conversions = 0, Clicks > 50, Impressions > 100, Cost > 2* Account’s Avg. CPA
You can customize the numbers as per the data set you receive from the search terms report. This is just to give you an idea what all we can consider for getting a final list for scrubbing the negative keywords from the search term report.
Step 6: Once we have received the list of keywords that are incurring cost and not converting, then we will go through each and every search term and check for client’s business relevancy.
Step 7: Qualify a search term for negative only if it is totally irrelevant to the business otherwise do not suggest it as negative.
Step 8: Deciding the match type of the negative terms and deciding on which level do we need to suggest as negative is totally a subjective call. It will totally depend on the type of keyword and the campaign structure followed by the account. For example terms like “porn” can be added as a broad negative at account level since it is totally irrelevant for businesses that run campaigns via Google Ads.